1. Field of the Invention
In general, the present invention relates to electronic field population. Specifically, the present invention provides a way to populate a field of a record using information determined/extracted from a corresponding entry of a mapping table.
2. Related Art
As Information Technology (IT) continues to advance, many organizations are faced with the task of migrating their existing computer infrastructures, telephone systems and the like to newer technology. For example, an organization might wish to migrate its networking functions from token ring to Ethernet. Similarly, an organization might wish to migrate its telephone service from a landline-based service to a voice-over-IP service.
In performing an IT migration, an organization might be faced with the undaunting task of migrating several hundreds or thousands of computers. As part of the IT migration electronic records might be kept for each computer system for which a migration is being performed. The record could specify some identifying information about the computer system as well as information about the upgrade that is being performed. For example, if an Ethernet adapter was added to a computer system pursuant to the IT migration, the record might indicated the type of adapter, the date of change, etc.
To date, the population of such records has been a manual process. Specifically, one or more individuals will manually input the migration data into various fields of the record. Given the large quantity of computer systems that an IT migration could involve, this can be an expensive and time consuming task. In view of the foregoing, there exists a need for a system that can automatically populate fields of record. Specifically, a need exists for a system that can automatically populate fields of a record (e.g., for an IT migration) using information from another electronic resource such as a mapping table or the like.